Esky: November 1999

It would be fun to be a genius, we sometimes think, and to know it all, instead of just acting like we do.

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If we were a real genius, this would be such a greater magazine. (Is that grammatically correct? We would know.) Every sentence of this magazine--which, as geniuses, we would have to write ourselves--would contain insights of such incandescence it would change the way its readers thought. Not persuade them, mind you, but actually go in there andrearrange the dendrites and axioms, or whatever they're called. And the scent strips would cure disease, in addition to making you smell great.

It wouldn't be fair to confine ourselves to the magazine; we'd probably go out on the lecture circuit. That way, we'd be able to show the humps (of the bell curve; our own little pet name for the mean-IQ crowd) that we were a regular person like them, only a genius and therefore more alluring. Which, we suppose, would inevitably lead to a run for president.

We mean, after we're a genius. Because we would feel obligated to share our grasp of the nation's problems and our geniusy solutions. Like Warren Beatty does at parties. "This is a guy," a big Democratic donor said of Beatty recently, "who at any time at a dinner party or some other conversational situation is always jumping into some discussion of one political issue or another." We would be just like that, and sooner or later somebody would insist that we run for president, perhaps sarcastically, but we'd see right through that to the crying need in this country for our genius.

Our platform would not be liberal or compassionate or conservative or any of that intellectually weak stuff. It would be the stuff of genius. Perhaps we would propose, as a Mensan newsletter did a few years back, that people "who are so mentally defective that they cannot live in society should, as soon as they are identified as defective, be humanely dispatched" and that the incorrigibly homeless "should be humanely done away with, like abandoned kittens." Once we were a genius, we'd probably figure out a better way to phrase that.

Of course, being a genius wouldn't be all beer and skittles (though it will be such a relief to use the phrase "all beer and skittles" and have some idea what it means). Because as much as the humps idolize genius, they resent geniuses. As Sharon Stone well knows. "If I was just intelligent, I'd be okay," she once said. "But I am fiercely intelligent, which most people find very threatening." She could find a no more willing soul mate than Bill Clinton, whose notoriously fierce intelligence has made him the target of the worse kind of hump chatter. (The girlizing is just an excuse.)

The real dilemma of being a genius, it seems, is that you're smart enough to realize that the rules don't apply to you, but nobody else is. Say you're Stanley Kubrick, so much a genius that Hollywood is at a loss of what to call you, not wanting to put you in the same category as Eddie Murphy, and therefore has to resort to genuine genius. So you put out a tortured, meditative work, and, even though you're dead, people snipe at you, complaining that the sex wasn't very hot. It's like what Woody Allen said--well, we've forgotten exactly, but the gist of it was that artistic geniuses are above such hump constructs as morality and certain state statutes.

So you can see why we would have our moods. It is not for nothing that you often hear of a misunderstood genius and a tortured genius but rarely of a happy-go-lucky genius. Genius is pain, as John Lennon said and Kurt Cobain demonstrated. Mostly, we're guessing, because when you're a genius you know the way things should be, with you on top telling everybody what to do, and the humps just don't get it. And also because, for all your genius, you are not able to achieve anything which surpasses your ability to find fault with it. And perhaps a little because nobody wants to hang out with you anymore.

Yes, it would be fun to be a genius and to clutch our head and bang it on things meaningfully. But it's also not that bad being a hump. At least there's more company.